"Let no freedom be allowed to novelty, because it is not fitting that any addition should be made to antiquity. Let not the clear faith and belief of our forefathers be fouled by any muddy admixture."
-- Pope Sixtus III

Friday, July 14, 2017

For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported a photon from the ground to a satellite in orbit.It’s been 20 years since quantum scientists successfully teleported a photon over 10 miles, proving that quantum entanglement — a process that Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” -- was possible.The very unnatural phenomenon occurs when two quantum objects, such as photons, share a wave function. Since they come into existence at the exact same time and place, they share the same identity, even when separated. What happens to one happens to the other — wherever it exists.In 2010, a team at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai set a record by teleporting photons over 60 miles on Earth.And now, just seven years later, they’ve outdone themselves, teleporting protons from a ground station in Tibet, 2½ miles above sea level, to a satellite orbiting Earth more than 310 miles away.It marks the first time an object has been teleported from our planet into space.Last year, China launched a research satellite called Micius into a sun-synchronous orbit, meaning it passes over the same point on Earth at the same time every day. Chinese scientists then created thousands of entangled pairs of photons and beamed one photon from each pair to Micius. After measuring both photons, they confirmed that 911 on Micius remained entangled with their companions on Earth.They’re more than identical twins. The two are one and the same.And, theoretically, the sky isn’t the limit. Photons are fragile; when they interact with matter on Earth and in Earth’s atmosphere, they lose entanglement. But in the vacuum of space, they can extend infinitely.And while the process won’t exactly succeed in making Captain Kirk demolecularize on the Starship Enterprise and remolecularize on a planet below, it has the potential nonetheless to change the world as we know it. Quantum teleportation is seen as the basis for unimaginably high-speed communication and foolproof cryptography. Since the two objects are not twins but actually the same object, what happens to one happens instantaneously to the other.Beam that up, Scottie.

Pay no attention to the hype surrounding the tax-cheating woman-beater and the racist who's never boxed. (Neither of whom know how to speak or dress themselves.) Chances are there's a Golden Gloves tournament featuring real men and real boys about to grow up within driving distance.

Oscar De La Hoya’s letter in full:To my fellow #boxing fans:I write in the hopes that together we can protect the sport of boxing.With each passing day, it looks more and more likely that the circus known as Floyd Mayweather Vs. Conor McGregor will be coming to town in the near future.As undercard fights start to take form, athletic commissions give their blessings in exchange for millions of dollars and the fighters start counting even more cash, one group will eventually be left to make sure this farce doesn’t occur.We, the fans, who are the lifeblood of our sport.Boxing is starting to dig out of the hole that Floyd and Manny Pacquiao shoveled by waiting seven years to put on a fight that ended up being as dull as it was anti-climactic.2017 has started off as a banner year for boxing. Joshua vs. Klitschko; Thurman vs. Garcia; Golovkin vs. Jacobs; Canelo vs. Chavez. All four of these fights – and many more — have brought the fight game back and reinvigorated interest from the ever-elusive casual fan.But if you thought Mayweather/Pacquiao was a black eye for our sport – a matchup between two of the best pound-for-pound fighters that simply didn’t deliver — just wait until the best boxer of a generation dismantles someone who has never boxed competitively at any level – amateur or professional.Our sport might not ever recover.I fully understand the initial attraction from any fan of combat sports. McGregor is almost certainly the best pound-for-pound MMA fighter. Floyd is Floyd — the most dominant boxer of his time.But success in one sport does not guarantee success in another. Far from it. And let’s be clear, these are two different sports — from the size of the gloves fighters wear, to the size and shape of the ring, to the fact the one sport allows combatants to use their legs to strike.Think about it, beyond Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, what other athlete has successfully competed in two sports in the modern age? And Jackson and Sanders both played both baseball and football throughout their high school and college careers before going professional.Furthermore, it’s not like McGregor would be fighting a good fighter, let alone a mediocre one. He would be fighting the best. To use a bit of an extreme analogy, I happen to be a pretty good golfer. Could I potentially hold my own on one of the second-tier tours? Maybe. But would I be able to compete with Rory McIlroy, Jordan Speith or Sergio Garcia? Of course not. Nor would I think to try.Now, I know critics will say that I’m only writing this letter because my company is promoting what will be the culmination of an outstanding boxing year when Canelo Alvarez takes on Gennady “GGG” Golovkin in September, and I don’t want anything to distract attention away from that fight.But my interest is in the health of boxing as a whole. It always has been. And if Floyd were to come out of retirement to take on someone like Keith “One–time” Thurman, Errol Spence or some other top welterweight, not only would I applaud the fight, I’d be the first one on line for a ticket.That kind of fight is what the fans – and I am a fan first — deserve.Which brings me back to the circus.Floyd’s and Conor’s motivation is clear. It’s money. In fact, they don’t even pretend it’s not. But it’s also a lack of consequences for when the fight ends up being the disaster that is predicted. After this fight, neither of them will need us anymore. Floyd will go back to retirement — presumably for good this time with another nine-figure paycheck — and Conor will go back to the UFC.It’s a win-win for them. It’s a lose-lose for us. We’ll be $100 lighter and we will have squandered another opportunity to bring boxing back to its rightful place as the sport of kings.At this point, only we can shut the circus down by making it clear that we won’t pay to see a joke of a fight and telling our casual-fan friends that they shouldn’t either.Sincerely,Oscar

The Chinese people have always been slaves. The courageous life of Liu Xiaobo proves the evildoers can kill the body but never the man. What gave him indomitable will in the face of totalitarian power? Love.Let us hope and pray some of the slaves noticed that a real man is always free, even when shackled and beaten.

From The Old Gray Whore that employs more Maoists than you might think:

As Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous political prisoner, lay dying under police guard, he struggled to finish what was probably his last written work. It was not a political statement, but a sometimes playful, sometimes darkly cryptic, tribute to his wife, Liu Xia, an artist and poet who endured house arrest while he served an 11-year prison sentence.

“Love as intense as ice, love as remote as blackness,” reads one of the handwritten notes Mr. Liu wrote in a hospital in the northeastern city of Shenyang before he died of liver cancer on Thursday. “My praise is perhaps an unforgivable poison,” he wrote in the brief and sometimes fragmentary tribute to his wife and her art.

Mr. Liu’s notes were for the preface of an unpublished collection of his wife’s photographs provisionally titled “Accompanying Liu Xiaobo.” His notes and the photo collection were shared by a Chinese editor who was a friend of the couple and who had helped compile the book. The editor said Mr. Liu made contact late last month and that people close to Mr. Liu later passed on pictures of his notes from the hospital. The editor asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of repercussions.

But his last known writing shows how Mr. Liu, whose fame began in the 1980s when he was a quarrelsome literary academic, remained an artistic soul who drew inspiration from Ms. Liu and feared for her future. She has lived under constant police watch since Mr. Liu received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Remember, kiddies, the pen is mightier than the GULAG.

Ms. Liu’s book may include a few poems that speak of the couple’s bond, and of the isolation and anguish she endured while Mr. Liu was imprisoned, said the editor, who is seeking a foreign publisher.

Her black-and-white photographs include many images of dolls with pained expressions in nightmarish settings. Some of the images have been exhibited before. One shows a doll locked in a birdcage, holding a flickering candle. Another shows a doll whose arms and legs are tied with strips of cloth.

In one poem dedicated to Mr. Liu, which was shared by the editor, Ms. Liu wrote:

I know sooner or later the day will comeWhen you’ll leave meAnd walk alone down the road of darkness.

Many other people have voiced concern for Ms. Liu since the government revealed that Mr. Liu had advanced liver cancer late last month, a point at which a cure was nearly impossible.

Friends and supporters said they feared that Chinese security forces could force Ms. Liu back into house arrest, although she has not been accused of any crime.

In the insane materialistic worldview of left-fascism, reality is a crime.

Ms. Liu has found her isolation hard to take. In a rare interview in 2012, when reporters with The Associated Press managed to evade guards outside her apartment in Beijing, she said, “Kafka could not have written anything more absurd.”

Now Ms. Liu won’t have even the consolation of visiting her husband once a month and hoping for his release.

“That’s what we’re worried about. Now he’s gone, we’re all worried that Liu Xia will face serious difficulties and struggle to cope,” said Wu Yangwei, a writer who uses the pen name Ye Du and was a friend of the couple.

“If she stays in China, the house arrest and surveillance won’t let up for several years at least,” Mr. Wu said. “She needs to go somewhere free so that she can preserve her health, otherwise the consequences could be unthinkable.”

“There’s an incredible sense of urgency about how best to help her,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch. “Every single government I’ve talked to in the last week has been very focused on how to try to help her. We are sick with worry about the prospect of her just going right back into house arrest.”

At a briefing on Friday, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Geng Shuang, bristled at the international criticism that followed Mr. Liu’s death and brushed aside repeated questions about whether Ms. Liu would be allowed to leave the country. He said, as Beijing officials often do, that such matters were part of China’s internal affairs.

“His words and deeds go against the principles and purposes of the peace prize,” Mr. Geng said.

But Mr. Liu’s handwritten preface also reflected his passion for art, literature and ideas, a side of him that became obscured in the focus on his political activism and his Nobel Prize.

“Appreciation has become my destiny in life, perhaps it’s the instinct of a polar bear enjoying hibernation in the vast snows,” he wrote in the tribute to his wife and her art.

Mr. Liu shot to official notoriety in 1989, when he sided with the student protesters who occupied Tiananmen Square to demand political liberalization. He was arrested days after the armed crackdown of June 3-4, when he and three friends helped avoid bloodshed on the square itself by negotiating with soldiers to let protesters leave peacefully. He served 21 months in detention.

But before that turning point, Mr. Liu was already known as a combative and original literary thinker. His dying comments on his wife’s work show how that artistic background stayed with him, and underline the bond formed with Ms. Liu through poems they wrote for each other.

“Liu Xia’s photographs and Liu Xiaobo’s poems struggle with shared demons,” Perry Link, a professor of Chinese at the University of California, Riverside, wrote in his introduction for the unpublished selection of Ms. Liu’s work, which he agreed to share. “The two artists look, feel and worry side by side.”

Mr. Liu and Ms. Liu met in the 1980s, when they belonged to a broad circle of writers, artists and academics embracing the new freedom and ideas opened up by economic reform and a measure of political relaxation. Ms. Liu abandoned a job in the financial bureaucracy to write poetry and make art. Mr. Liu completed a doctorate in literature but bridled at convention and censorship.

Later, after their first marriages had broken up and Mr. Liu emerged from prison, they became close. They married in 1996 while he was serving a sentence in a labor camp for his political advocacy.

“I lived as a convict’s wife. During this period of intense loneliness and desperation I began taking black-and-white photographs,” Ms. Liu wrote in a dedication at the front of the book. “I am so grateful to my family for their inexhaustible love during the difficult times.”

Liu Xiaobo, the renegade Chinese intellectual who kept vigil at Tiananmen Square in 1989 to protect protesters from encroaching soldiers, promoted a pro-democracy charter that brought him a lengthy prison sentence and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while locked away, died under guard in a hospital on Thursday. He was 61.

The Bureau of Justice in Shenyang, the city in northeastern China where Mr. Liu was being treated for liver cancer, announced his death on its website.

The Chinese government revealed he had cancer in late June, only after the illness was virtually beyond treatment. Officially, Mr. Liu gained medical parole. But even as he faced death, he was kept silenced in the First Hospital of China Medical University, still a captive of the authoritarian controls that he had fought for decades.

He was the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in state custody since Carl von Ossietzky, the German pacifist and foe of Nazism who won the prize in 1935 and died under guard in 1938 after years of maltreatment.

Read and learn, kiddies. Left or Right makes no difference in the real world. Those are just words. But fascism is real.

“After multiple treatments, Liu Xiaobo’s condition continued to deteriorate,” the Shenyang Bureau of Justice said in a statement. “On July 10, he entered a state of rescue and intensive care, and on July 13, he died due to multiple organ failure after attempts to save him failed.”

Allow me to translate that into non-totalitarian for you:

"We finally killed that dirty little insect. Too bad he made so much noise while alive...we could have simply shot him in the head and buried him in a forest if nobody knew his name."

The police in China have kept Mr. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, under house arrest and smothering surveillance, preventing her from speaking out about Mr. Liu’s belated treatment for cancer.

“Can’t operate, can’t do radiotherapy, can’t do chemotherapy,” Ms. Liu said in a brief video message to a friend when her husband’s fatal condition was announced. The message quickly spread online.

Mr. Liu’s illness elicited a deluge of sympathy from officials, friends, Chinese rights activists and international groups, who saw him as a fearless advocate of peaceful democratic change.

“The reaction to his illness shows how much he was respected,” said Cui Weiping, a former professor of literature in Beijing who knew Mr. Liu and now lives in Los Angeles. “People from all walks of life — friends, strangers, young people — have been outraged to hear that someone with terminal cancer was kept locked up till he died.”

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said on Thursday, “The human rights movement in China and across the world has lost a principled champion who devoted his life to defending and promoting human rights, peacefully and consistently, and who was jailed for standing up for his beliefs.”

Blah-blah-blah from an ineffective pansy who licks the boots of murderers all day long.

Terry E. Branstad, the United States ambassador to China, said in an emailed statement, “China has lost a deeply principled role model who deserved our respect and adulation, not the prison sentences to which he was subjected.”

He added, “We call on China to release all prisoners of conscience and to respect the fundamental freedoms of all.”

Ditto.

Mr. Liu was arrested most recently in 2008, after he helped initiate Charter 08, a bold petition calling for democracy, the rule of law and an end to censorship.

A year later, a court in Beijing tried and convicted Mr. Liu on a charge of inciting subversion. The petition and essays he wrote in which he upbraided and mocked the Chinese government were cited in the verdict. Mr. Liu responded to his trial with a warning about China’s future.

“Hatred can rot a person’s wisdom and conscience,” he said in a statement he prepared for the trial. “An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation and inflame brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.”

By the time of the trial, Mr. Liu was already China’s best-known dissident, and his fame grew even more when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while imprisoned in northeast China.

After his death was announced, Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the Chinese government “bears a heavy responsibility for his premature death.”

“Liu Xiaobo will remain a powerful symbol for all who fight for freedom, democracy and a better world,” Ms. Reiss-Andersen said by email. “He was truly a prisoner of conscience, and he paid the highest possible price for his relentless struggle.”

Mr. Liu could not collect the Nobel Prize himself, and he was represented at the ceremony by an empty chair. His statement for his trial, which he was not allowed to read out, served in his absence as his Nobel lecture.

“Xiaobo was wedded both psychically and physically to China and its fate,” Geremie R. Barmé, an Australian Sinologist and a close friend of Mr. Liu’s, wrote in a tribute before Mr. Liu’s death. “In the end, his words and deeds may have garnered him a Nobel Prize, yet in an authoritarian system, one that since 1989 has oscillated merely between the poles of the cruel and the pitiless, they sealed his fate.”

Confrontation and detention were nothing new to Mr. Liu.

He was born on Dec. 28, 1955, in Jilin Province, in northeast China. The son of a professor who remained loyal to the Communist Party, Mr. Liu made a vocation out of obdurate opposition to authoritarianism.

"Authoritarianism"? Are you fucking kidding me? That one word choice is exactly why nobody with a conscience takes The Old Gray Whore seriously and hasn't for decades. Talk about licking the blood of innocents off the boots of their killers!

“He was a dissident even among dissidents,” Yu Jie, a friend and biographer, said. Mr. Yu now lives in the United States.

He added, “Liu Xiaobo was willing to criticize himself and reflect on his actions in a way that even many activists in the democracy movement can’t.”

Mr. Yu recalled the first time Mr. Liu spoke to him over the phone, in about 1999. “He said, ‘I’ve read your book, and there’s a lot I disagree with,’ ” Mr. Yu said. “He criticized me for about half an hour.”

Mr. Liu started out as a notoriously abrasive literary critic in Beijing in the 1980s. He was called a “dark horse” who bridled at intellectual conformity, even in the name of reform. But he was increasingly drawn into political questions as Deng Xiaoping, the Communist leader, resisted matching economic liberalization with political transformation.

In 1989, he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University when students in Beijing occupied Tiananmen Square to demand democratic changes and an end to party corruption. He returned to Beijing to support the protests. He later described that time as a turning point, one that ended his academic career and set him irrevocably into a life of political opposition.

Mr. Liu’s sympathy for the students was not unreserved; he eventually urged them to leave Tiananmen Square and return to their campuses. As signs grew that the Communist Party leadership would use force to end the protests, Mr. Liu and three friends, including the singer Hou Dejian, held a hunger strike on the square to show solidarity with the students, even as they advised them to leave.

“If we don’t join the students in the square and face the same kind of danger, then we don’t have any right to speak,” Mr. Hou quoted Mr. Liu as saying.

When the army moved in, hundreds of protesters died in the gunfire and the chaos on roads leading to Tiananmen Square. But without Mr. Liu and his friends, the bloodshed might have been worse. On the night of June 3, they stayed in the square with thousands of students as tanks, armored vehicles and soldiers closed in.

A man, a hero, a true patriot, a man of learning...Liu Xiaobo was a real mensch.

Mr. Liu and his friends negotiated with the troops to create a safe passage for the remaining protesters to leave the square, and he coaxed the students to flee without a final showdown.

“I understand what you’re feeling, but haven’t you considered how as soon as the first shot rings out, Tiananmen Square will become a river of blood?” Mr. Liu told the students, as he recounted in a memoir published in 1989.

“If he hadn’t been on the scene, I’m sure people would have died on the square. That was his pacifism in action,” said Liu Suli, a friend of Mr. Liu’s who stayed with him and others on Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3. “Xiaobo had a kind of heroism complex that never left him.”

Mr. Liu was arrested days after the crackdown and spent 21 months in detention for supporting the protests. He lost his university lecturing job, his books were banned and the Communist Party labeled him a “black hand” who had helped foment turmoil. His later support for American government policies, including the invasion of Iraq, also brought scorn.

But he was unbowed. In 1996, he was sent to a labor camp for three years after demanding clemency for those still in prison for joining the demonstrations.

Mr. Liu did not instigate Charter 08. But after he joined activists who were preparing to release it, he worked to make its demands acceptable to as many people as possible, tramping from door to door in Beijing to recruit prominent signers.

The petition at first drew 303 signers, including many prominent Chinese writers, academics, lawyers and former officials who were recruited by Mr. Liu. By May 2009, the number of signers had grown to over 8,600, including supporters living overseas.

“He was able to span people inside and outside the system,” said his friend Ms. Cui, who also signed the charter. “He also linked together opposition movements from different generations. I don’t think anyone other than Liu Xiaobo could have done that.”

Mr. Liu and most other participants dismissed the risk that they could be severely punished. But his wife feared that the government would retaliate harshly. In the statement that Mr. Liu wrote for his trial, he thanked Ms. Liu for her “selfless love.”

“Even if I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with ashes,” he wrote. “Dearest, with your love, I will calmly face the impending trial, with no regrets for my choices, and will look forward with hope to tomorrow.”

The Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo, in His Own Words JULY 13, 2017

In Liu Xiaobo’s Last Days, Supporters Fight China for His Legacy JULY 11, 2017

Cynics are said to be people who are prematurely disappointed about the future. Such dyspepsia is encouraged by watching Republicans struggle to move on from the dog's breakfast they have made of health care reform to the mare's nest of tax reform. Concerning which, House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose preternatural optimism makes Candide seem morose, says: "If we're going to truly fix our tax code, then we've got to fix all of it." Trying to fix "all of" immigration in 2013 and health care in 2010 with "comprehensive" legislation left almost everyone irritable. Perhaps the third time is the charm. Sen. Ron Wyden is skeptical about fixing much this year, even given Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's decision to limit the August recess.The fourth-most senior Democrat and ranking minority member on the tax-writing Finance Committee, Wyden, 68, is usually relaxed but now is especially so, for two reasons. He was just elected to a fourth term. And for him and other Finance Committee Democrats, tax reform is, so far, an undemanding spectator sport. This was underscored last weekend when, as he was being driven from one Oregon town hall to another, he read a Wall Street Journal story headlined: "GOP Tax Overhaul's Fate Rests on 'Big Six' Talks."Five of the six were in an almost taunting photo provided to the Journal by Ryan's office -- Ryan, McConnell, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The missing sixth person was National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn. No congressional Democrat is included. Evidently, Republicans plan to pass tax reform without Democratic votes, under "reconciliation," which is inherently partisan -- 51 votes will suffice -- and limits debate to 20 hours. The 1986 reform, the gold standard of bipartisan tax legislation, was on the Senate floor for more than 100 hours spread over 20 days -- after seven days of hearings and 16 days of mark-up.Ryan and McConnell say tax reform will be "revenue neutral." This might require dynamic scoring -- calculating that reformed incentives will stimulate economic growth -- to project implausible growth rates. Plausibility is, however, optional, as it was in April, when Mnuchin's department produced a tax plan that resembled Lincoln's "soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death." The document -- "shorter than a drug store receipt," says Wyden -- was one page long, contained 218 words, eight numbers and a thumping vacuity, the promise to "eliminate tax breaks for special interests."Last November, Mnuchin told CNBC there would be "no absolute tax cut for the upper class," meaning no net cut after lost deductions. In Mnuchin's January confirmation hearing, Wyden mischievously suggested calling this "the Mnuchin rule," which enthralled Mnuchin, who later said: "I feel like I'm now in good company with the Volcker rule and the Buffett rule." In a June hearing, however, Mnuchin told Wyden: "You made it a rule, I didn't make it a rule." It would be entertaining to watch Republicans try to adhere to that rule while fulfilling their promise - from which they began retreating on Tuesday -- to repeal the 3.8 percent Obamacare tax on investment income.No Democrat, says Wyden, likes the status quo. When he recently described the tax code as "a rotting economic carcass," his wife asked him to stop scaring the children. The complexity of the code, which is more than 4 million words, is why America has more people employed as tax preparers (1.2 million) than as police and firefighters. If tax compliance were an industry, it would be among the nation's largest; it devours 6.1 billion hours annually, the equivalent of more than 3 million full-time workers.Wyden knows he sounds like "a one-song juke box" when he keeps stressing "wage growth" but he notes that last week the encouraging number of jobs created in June (222,000) was accompanied by discouraging wage growth (year-over-year, 2.5 percent, barely ahead of inflation). Many economists are puzzled that low unemployment (4.4 percent) is not forcing employers to bid up the price of labor. Wyden says he is puzzled by neither the cause (persistent slow growth, limping at around 2 percent) nor the cause of this cause -- insufficient money in middle-class paychecks to power an economy where 70 percent of the fuel comes from consumer spending. He favors, for example, doubling the earned income tax credit. He seems, however, to be pre-emptively, but not prematurely, disappointed about a legislative process that will fall somewhat short of fixing "all of" what ails the rotting carcass.

That quaking beneath your feet is from shock waves in Washington where tipping points are merging with other tipping points to create the Mother of All Tipping Points.

Not only did Donald Trump Jr. meet with a Russian attorney who, he was told, had damaging information about Hillary Clinton, but also there are emails indicating that he knew in advance that the opposition research was part of the Kremlin’s effort to help Donald Trump become president. If that’s not collusion, it seems at least “collusioney,” a newly minted term surely destined to erase all memory of Monday’s exhaustively used “nothing-burger.” Smoking guns don’t need to be nearly this hot to capture Washington’s attention, but these latest revelations should be enough to make every American take a deep breath. Whether Trump Jr. is merely stupid is yet to be determined, but he wasn’t alone in that meeting. Joining him were his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Paul J. Manafort, then Trump Sr.’s campaign manager, who is known to have had business dealings in Russia for a number of years. The New York Times broke the story over the weekend, reporting that three (unnamed) individuals had corroborated the existence of the damning emails, which clearly establish intent to “something.” Tuesday afternoon, Trump Jr. released the email thread between him and some guy — named Rob Goldstone — a music publicist who knew some guy who knew Donald Trump vis-a-vis the Trump-owned Miss Universe contest. Got that? Goldstone arranged the meeting, which took place in Trump Tower in June 2016 — just before the Republican primary season had ended — to talk about dirt on the presumptive nominee’s general-election opponent. After Goldstone said that the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had information that would incriminate Clinton, Trump Jr. replied that he’d “love it.” Who wouldn’t? You’re the namesake son of the man on track to become the Republican nominee and possibly president — and Russia wants to help him win? Hell da !The fact that the alleged opposition research was part of Russia’s war on Clinton, as indicated in one of the emails, would have raised flags for most people — no, make that for all but these people. I’m confident that, if the nice Ace Hardware man who recently helped me select a mailbox were to receive such an email, he’d contact the FBI as soon as possible.Which, obviously, is what Junior, Manafort and Kushner should have done. Thus, we can presume that all three knew better than to attend such a meeting. After all, it could well have been a trap — and I’m not sure it wasn’t. But to the inexperienced minds of Kushner and Trump Jr., the calculation may have been as simple (and feeble) as: Why not? Defeating Clinton was in the national interest, wasn’t it? And the Trumps have (or had) no pique with Russia. Trump Jr.’s claim that he didn’t tell his father about the meeting rather strains credulity, don’t you think? Ditto Veselnitskaya’s claim that she has never worked for the Kremlin and has no idea what all the fuss is about. She was here to lobby against American legislation that her client finds objectionable. In an exclusive interview Tuesday with NBC News, Veselnitskaya said she never had any “damaging or sensitive information about Hillary Clinton. It was never my intention to have that.” Asked where Trump Jr. could have gotten that idea, she responded, “It is quite possible that maybe they were longing for such an information. They wanted it so badly that they could only hear the thought that they wanted.”So, apparently, the future of the Trump presidency is in the hands of Goldstone. He set up the meeting; he brought Trump Jr. into a damning email exchange; he promised dirt. Wait, who is this guy again? Well, that’s a very good question. He’s an intermediary for Veselnitskaya, who either (a) works for the Kremlin and possibly even Vladimir Putin; or (b) is just a lawyer/lobbyist interested in U.S. policy. Wouldn’t we like to know? Also possible is that President Trump knew all along about the meeting, which may be why he acts like a cocker spaniel at a Doberman rally whenever the name Putin comes up. What did Veselnitskaya really come to say? For whom? More shock waves are doubtless coming. Meanwhile, we know for certain: When a Russian lawyer meets privately with the future president’s son, his son-in-law and his campaign manager on a third-party promise of Clinton-disabling intel, it’s hard to say the Trump campaign had nothing to do with Russia. For now: Collusioney.

For decades, Iranian revolutionary families would work late into the night to make sock puppets, cartoons and effigies of every American president since Jimmy Carter, then proudly parade them around during an anti-American protest and burn them in a bonfire.

Some would dress up with Uncle Sam top hats, Bill Clinton imitators would always have a big cigar hanging from his puppet mouth, and George W. Bush would be decorated with stars of David, to highlight the special relationship with Israel.

But as even the staunchest hard-liners would admit, the number of zealous protesters had dwindled over the years. In recent times, most people have been content just to pick up posters given to them by the authorities. Barack Obama’s outreach to Iran, brokering a nuclear agreement and giving up on regime change, was not good for the local sock puppet and effigy industry.

But in President Trump the United States has a new, colorful president (Well, orange is a color...- F.G.) who denounces Iran, and Iranian hard-line groups cannot believe their good luck. This Monday, at a cartoon and caricature contest where the only goal was to make fun of President Trump, the zealots were back in force.

Several winners received cash prizes in dollars for showing the president in the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan, sharing a Time magazine cover with Adolf Hitler, or as Captain America wielding the Statue of Liberty as a bludgeon.

Some of the cartoons were also hung across Tehran. One poster, featured prominently at a busy intersection, showed Mr. Trump doing something to the rear of an elephant, symbol of the Republican Party, while also wearing a swastika armband and with the decapitated head of Lady Liberty at its feet.

The winning caricature, worth a $1,500 cash prize, showed Mr. Trump in a suit made of $100 bills, his hair on fire and drool dripping from his mouth. Winning artists also received an abstract statue topped with a golden swoosh of Mr. Trump’s signature hairdo.

The date of the exhibition, July 3, is the anniversary of the downing of an Iranian passenger plane by the United States Navy in 1988 that killed all 290 people on board. While the Pentagon has always insisted the incident was a tragic mistake, many Iranians are convinced the plane was shot down to pressure Iran into ending its eight-year war with Iraq.

“We are really, really happy with Trump,” said Resalat Bouzari, a speaker at the event. “He shows the real face of the so-called United States democracy.” Everybody clapped, and when Iran’s national anthem played, stood up from their chairs to see a video of happy Iranians cheering for their country. Visitors were given books with the logo of the exhibition, a black-circled “T” on a white and red background, suggestive of the swastika that was present in several of the cartoons.

“Trump is the symbol of fascism and Nazism, and many investigated his statements and concluded they are similar to those made by Adolf Hitler,” said the organizer of the event, Masoud Shojaei-Tabataei. He has been organizing — or told to organize — cartoon contests for several years now.

He started after European newspapers began publishing cartoons depicting the prophet of Islam, Muhammad. In retaliation, Iran organized a Holocaust cartoon contest.

For Jeremy Arn, being a prosecutor in Milwaukee’s most dangerous neighborhoods means spending more time on the streets than in court.His officemates are police officers in District 5, the city’s busiest, and his focus is not just locking people up, but preventing crime and giving people second chances.The transformation of the prosecutor’s traditional role and the collaboration with police has special significance in Milwaukee, where the incarceration rate for African-Americans in some neighborhoods is the highest in the U.S. and law enforcement is hoping to rebuild a strained relationship after two nights of riots last summer when a black officer fatally shot a black man during a traffic stop. The arrangement has made prosecutors more accessible to residents, though its success is much harder to quantify than courtroom work.On one recent afternoon, Arn, who previously worked for the State Department in Afghanistan and Iraq advising local prosecutors, cheered the sight of an empty street, much like he would a conviction — because it meant criminals were gone, at least for now.“Look at that. It’s a ghost town; that’s awesome,” he said as he rode with a police officer past a convenience store that’s been the site of loitering and drug-dealing complaints but had recently followed advice from police and Arn to hire armed security.While on patrol, Arn, 39, trades his courtroom attire for cargo pants, a plaid shirt and the required bulletproof vest. When he invites a landlord to the police station to talk about a property that might be the site of prostitution and drug trafficking, Arn tells her she’s not in trouble before making suggestions on how deal with the problem.The model of putting prosecutors in neighborhoods began in Portland, Oregon, in 1990, when a business district helped fund the effort. Variations of the concept have spread around the country, but Milwaukee is one of just a few places to put prosecutors in police stations.The idea is more relevant than ever as police nationwide try rebuild the public’s trust after high-profile shootings. The Prosecutors’ Center for Excellence, an organization of district attorneys, last year singled out combined police/prosecutor presence in communities as “essential to combat this mistrust in law enforcement.”“The ground has shifted, and people are now conscious and aware of the systemic issues to a degree that they are actually demanding that we solve problems and not simply take the politically convenient route of the tough-on-crime rhetoric,” said Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, whose office is relying on federal grant money to put a prosecutor in each police district in Milwaukee.But that funding is not guaranteed. If funding is not renewed by the U.S. Justice Department by July 22, the district attorney’s office will pull prosecutors from three of the city’s seven police districts, including the one where riots erupted last year.Most of Wisconsin’s black residents live in Milwaukee’s north side neighborhoods covered by District 5 and District 7 — where more than half of the city’s homicides last year occurred. A study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found that almost all of the black men behind bars in the state during the 2010 census were from Milwaukee north side neighborhoods. In one particular ZIP code, 53206, nearly half the residents live below poverty level, 13 percent are unemployed, and a quarter of the housing units are vacant, according to 2015 census estimates.“If you keep intervening through arrest and formal prosecution, you’re just going to continue to disenfranchise that same pocket of neighborhoods and of people,” said Jeffrey Altenburg, a deputy district attorney who helped launch the initiative in Milwaukee about a decade ago.As part of their efforts, Milwaukee prosecutors are looking for alternatives to prison for nonviolent offenders. About 70 percent of the nearly 900 people who took part in deferred prosecution agreements in the last two years have fulfilled conditions that can include completing drug treatment, staying out of legal trouble, or taking job training classes.“You have a big say about what can happen to somebody’s life, and it’s important to take that seriously,” said Hanna Kolberg, the prosecutor stationed in District 7, the site of the riots.A key aspect of the initiative is to focus on people and places that have a disproportionate impact on an area, whether it’s habitual offenders or businesses and vacant homes that become a magnet for criminal activity. That’s why much of the work is driven by what prosecutors and police hear from residents at neighborhood meetings, where they learn about drug dealers, nuisance properties and other concerns.Assistant Police Chief James Harpole, an early skeptic of the program when he was a district commander, now he thinks of the effort as part of a “holistic approach” to improving the community. Plus, he said, “It has helped to break down barriers, to make the community and police closer.”At a recent meeting between residents and officers of District 5, Josephine Key told a police captain that she would like to see more officers patrolling on foot.“I would love to see my son get along with you guys,” Key, 64, said.Police and prosecutors still have detractors. Milwaukee’s American Civil Liberties Union (Go Red Devils! - F.G.) is suing the Police Department alleging officers have targeted minorities for stops — a charge the department denies. And Chisholm has been criticized for not prosecuting a white officer who fatally shot a mentally ill black man in 2014.Arn said residents’ mistrust of police runs deep, but he’s determined to overcome it.“Every appearance we make outside of the traditional squad car, every meeting we show up at, even if we’re getting yelled at, it’s a chance to build that relationship,” Arn said.TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

There are words out there that in practice mean something entirely different than what any dictionary says. Consider this a practical guide to innocent words used by evildoers to mislead everyone.

Democracy: A device used to give the powerless the illusion of power so they will develop all the vices associated with power and thus be distracted from their powerlessness.TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

There are words out there that in practice mean something entirely different than what any dictionary says. Consider this a practical guide to innocent words used by evildoers to mislead everyone.Modernity: The ability and the justification to murder people found inconvenient.

Anyone looking for another reason not to leave life-and-death issues to the state need look no further than the conflict between the British government and the parents of 11-month-old Charlie Gard.

Governments, including the British courts and the European court of human rights have refused to allow Charlie’s parents to take him to the U.S. for what they believe is life-saving treatment. In what many will regard as a cynical decision, UK judge Nicholas Francis gave Charlie’s parents just two days to present new evidence as to why their son should receive experimental treatment. A final decision will be handed down in a hearing on Thursday.

Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital where Charlie is on a ventilator, his brain reportedly damaged from a rare genetic condition, argue that he should be removed from life support and allowed to die. President Trump has offered help. Pope Francis also supports the parent’s right to determine what is best for their child.Charlie’s parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, believe an experimental treatment known as nucleoside therapy might work on their son. British doctors say it won’t improve the child’s “quality of life.” They want him to die. Apparently that’s OK with the state-run National Health Service (NHS), which is always looking for ways to cut costs.The parents have raised enough money to take Charlie to America for treatment. Wouldn’t most parents do all they could for their child, especially one so young who is helpless and at the mercy of adults? I know I would for my grandson, who is also named Charlie.Judges, bureaucrats and politicians should not be allowed to make such a decision, but the growing power of the state is increasingly assuming the power to determine who is fit to live and who should die — and to quote Scrooge from Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” “decrease the surplus population.” Who, or what, can stop them, assuming a majority want to?

When the state is allowed to assign value to a human life, the unwanted, the inconvenient, the sick, the elderly and the handicapped are all at risk. Seeing lives as less than valuable, or of no value, will bring us to the point where only the fit and healthy are allowed to live. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote in 1921, “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” The Nazis took this thinking to its most inhumane level with horrific results.Rot in Hell, you pus-ridden cunt!Oops! Pardon me. I meant to type: Will you please let that Nazi stuff go? That was sooooooo last century!(I'm trying to skew younger to attract the post-conscience demographic.)At a Monday hearing, Judge Francis said “new and powerful” evidence submitted by the parents and their attorney could overturn previous rulings. That would be good, but the larger question is why does a court get to decide what health care is best for a child?That should be the parents’ privilege and responsibility. MPs in Britain have introduced a bill to parliament, which would decriminalize abortion “by repealing a law that dates back to Victorian times.” How short a step is it from the complete devaluation of the unborn to infanticide, to euthanasia and finally and inevitably a full embrace of eugenics?It was University of Chicago professor of biology, Dr. Leon Kass, who issued this stern warning: “We have paid some high prices for the technological conquest of nature, but none so high as the intellectual and spiritual costs of seeing nature as mere material for our manipulation, exploitation and transformation. With the powers of biological engineering gathering, there will be splendid new opportunities for similar degradation of our view of man. ... If we come to see ourselves as meat, then meat we shall become.”"SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!"Charlie Gard is not “meat.” He and his parents should be allowed to come to America. As long as hope lives, so does Charlie.

About Me

First of all, the word is SEX, not GENDER. If you are ever tempted to use the word GENDER, don't. The word is SEX! SEX! SEX! SEX! For example: "My sex is male." is correct.
"My gender is male." means nothing. Look it up.
What kind of sick neo-Puritan nonsense is this? Idiot left-fascists, get your blood-soaked paws off the English language. Hence I am choosing "male" under protest.